I’ve often heard No-Limit Hold’em players mention that one of the reasons they don’t like Limit Hold’em is because pocket aces don’t win here. And as ridiculous as this thought may be, the concept of pocket aces being no good in Limit Hold’em is certainly worth looking into.
First off, you’ve got to look at how often pocket aces will hold up against other hands assuming everything went to the river in a 5 street hand. And when you do the math (I didn’t, I just looked at what some poker site said), pocket aces will hold up about 31% of the time against the field. If you look strictly at this then the argument starts to become clearer about pocket aces not winning in Limit Hold’em. But that’s because we’re only scratching the surface here.
So since we’ve figured out that pocket aces will win 31% of the time, or roughly one out of every 3 hands, let’s dive a little deeper into the subject with an example. Let’s say that you play all 3 of your pocket aces in separate hands and each player on a 10 person table contributes an average of $10 to the pot. This would be $100 per hand and you would be contributing $10 too for a total of $30. So if you won 1 out of 3 hands, you’d be getting $100 and only spending $30 to earn this with pocket aces.
You don’t need to be a math genius to figure out that you’re making a total of $70 in this exchange which makes it clear that playing aces in Limit Hold’em are definitely profitable. Of course things won’t always work out so nicely when you’re in real games, but the point is that you will come out on top by playing pocket aces wisely.